The Cathedral
by Jesper Svedberg

Many of my students probably think I am just as attached to this university as the Great Bell in the Tower of Pride, that I have never left my study except to fetch another book from the library or to teach them something, that they find completely useless, about the secrets of old women in distant kingdoms. They are perhaps not far from the truth either, I have not left this city within a city, known to us as the University of Baal, for almost ten dozen years. It might even be true that during these years, I have become a part of the university, just as attached as the Great Bell or the Fountain of Knowledge in the Atrium of Time. 
Despite all this, I was hungry for adventures in my youth, I travelled throughout the seven continents in search for hidden knowledge. During my self imposed exile I saw the most horrifying things, things that would make even the boldest of heroes go pale and shiver. Among those thing, one has denied me my sleep since a night over a century ago, no man could close his eyes with his soul filled with what I experienced. 
In my years as a student of this University and during my travels, I had encountered the Mountains of Cëthlû and the city of M'nafth in many archaic and mysterious scripts - among them the dreaded “Tales of Dark World Rhye and Its Unspeakable Empire” by the insane monk Carpatius - and had decided to take on the long journey to seek out this fabled and feared realm myself. 
On the continent of Lemuria far north-east of our University, near the edge of the world, the mountains of Cëthlû have set their roots. When you approach them on the old caravan route that in other ages transported forgotten and strange artefacts from now sunken continents, a feeling of unease fills your soul. The eerie black angular peaks gives you a feeling of hidden malevolence and when you enter the valleys walled by the first outrunners and into the narrow, dark valleys with their small dilapidated villages and dark, silent inhabitants, the feeling of unease grows into a paranoid terror and you are filled with the certainty that the demons of past ages are still powerful in these sun-denied vales. 
The dark forests covering the steep slopes are unnaturally silent, yet the air is filled with what that some people say is the trees whispering to whatever poor journeyman passing through of all the hideous pagan rituals and forbidden acts they have witnessed over the aeons these ancient rocks have stood as a fortress for the powers that in the dawn of time ruled the newly forged mountains and hills that we today know as our world. 
In a particularly deep valley, the city of M'nafth is built. The meadows and fields surrounding it are pale and appear to be drained of all shapes of life. They are spread over strangely eroded hills arousing the memories of the first men, memories screaming to us like priests, warning us of evils preying upon the careless soul. 
From the highest of the misshapen hills, you can look straight down into the city, the skewed black slated roofs, scattered tightly in the bottom of the valley. Even the seeming randomness forms an elusive pattern that whispers phrases of darkness. 
Unlike the farmers in the rural villages surrounding the city, the townsmen of M'nafth are pale to the skin and hair with red light-fearing eyes. They are a horrifying sight, radiating a feeble-minded malevolence. 
In the centre of the city, a great cathedral is built, or rather, the city is built around the great cathedral. Its architecture is like nothing else in the world, with arches and domes built with a roughness and imbalance that takes your mind on a journey into your memory, until it finally reaches the ruins that the herdsmen of Ban'ghonn can find on high hills when the moon is full and the light of the red star Beelz is blocked by the invisible celestial wanderer Rhye. 
As I arrived in the city, the gloomy atmosphere had caught even my hardened soul in its grip. The dark houses scared me and the giant cathedral, always looming in the corner of your eye, wherever you are in the city, wrapped my soul in a suffocating web of terror, and on the same time a morbid fascination for my own fright. 
The only inn in the city bore an name I can no longer recollect and was nearly empty when I stepped through its doorway. The innkeeper stood behind the desk and one man sat opposite him. The inn was an ordinary building in the centre of the city, the room the innkeeper gave me was almost clean and had a view over the square in front of the cathedral. I could not get much out of the innkeeper except that they did not see many strangers. The townsmen talked with a strange archaic, guttural accent that was very hard to understand, but I somehow felt that this is how the first of men spoke. 
I spent the rest of the day exploring the city, trying to find something that would justify all the efforts to reach what to me felt like the end of the world, but the people were unwilling to talk and the city was not filled with anything else than more black oblique houses and nothing to indicate that the eerie feeling that filled the air was anything else than a mind trick. 
But the horrendous cathedral still filled me with terror, especially from the inside, where the summer light radiated in through the coloured windows, picturing ancient, naked, monumental landscapes, thus giving the horrible sensation of staring out over the dawn of time. I was alone in the huge building, which surprised me; the cathedral had such a central position that I had assumed that it would be a central position in the social life of the town, but when I though back on it, the townsmen seemed to avoid the building. The great arched ceiling was held up by gigantic pillars carved with grotesque demonic creatures, in a pitch black variety of diabase. 
It would be midsummer in just a few days, an event that is important in most occult beliefs, so I decided to wait until then to await further events. I spent most of the few days wandering around in the mountains and the dark forests. Even though the weather had got worse, I preferred to walk around without shelter rather than sitting in the shadow of the cathedral and the gloomy houses. Even the darkest forests in the deepest valleys were less painful for my soul. 
On midsummer’s eve I stayed on my room to await any possible events. I sat on a hard wooden chair with no lights in my room and stared out the window, through the warping irregularities. The city was brimming with hidden anticipation, but not even my sensitive mind could get a grip of the reason. After a few hours I fell asleep, I do not know for how long, but was suddenly completely awake again. I looked out of the window, the square outside was still empty, but my mind sensed a subtle change, almost to faint to register, from eager anticipation to furious action. 
Within a few moments torches began to stream towards the dark cathedral from all over the city. I was on my feet in an instant and ran out of my room and down the stairs and out into the night. I had snatched a torch from a socket in the inn’s wall and blended into the rest of the crowd. The people marched resolutely towards the cathedral, yet they were all unnaturally silent, and nothing else was heard than the muffled sounds of our boots against the cobblestones as I was swept along towards what looked in the darkness as a huge beast, swallowing torch after torch. 
When I stepped through the doorway, I noticed that the vast space inside was lit up by two red glowing spheres, seemingly just hanging in thin air. The red light made everything look like it was bathing in a sea of fresh blood. The pale townsmen looked like corpses with their dead eyes, like an army of undead as they marched forward down the aisle towards the grotesquely decorated stone altar. Next to it stood a priest in a pitch black robe and a mask that looked like the skull of a carnivorous beast I could not identify. Now when I was almost up by the altar, I saw that it had been moved and revealed a dark staircase, spiralling down into the corrupted earth. 
I was swept along with the river of torches that were swallowed by the ground, like a waterfall going over the edge. I walked down the dusty stairs as a smell of decay hit me in the face, it was so strong and foul that I almost had to take a step back, but the rest of the crowd seemed unaffected by it and pressed on, so I fought my nausea and kept on in the downwards spiral. 
After what had seemed like hours, but could only have been about a quarter of an hour, of footsteps against the hard floor and the almost hypnotic circular move of the torches, I reached the end of the stairs. I stood in a natural cave that seemed to stretch onwards forever. The walls were covered with carvings, not at all like the elaborate pieces up in the cathedral, a world above me, but hacked out of the rocks with such a raw primal force and style. They radiated such a powerful malice, that they could not possibly have been carved by human hands. Any human that had created such foul and evil things would surely have been destroyed by his own mind. 
As I walked down the cold dark caves, I watched the horrible sceneries on the walls. They all pictured ghostly alien creatures in naked landscapes with titanic cities in the background. I was awed, and disgusted, by the artistic skill that were put into the rough carvings, they seemed to tell the history of something, but I was too unfocused to pay any attention. The townsmen did not look around, but kept on their silent walk with a frightening purposefulness and even though I was filled with horror, my curiosity prevailed and I followed them. 
Suddenly the carved cave opened up in a tremendous space and what I saw there wiped out everything else than the blind fear from my strained mind. 
The hall was lit up by the same kind of red spheres as the cathedral, and on the vast floor and against the walls, a titanic city had been built. Alien buildings of the same kind that I had seen in the carvings in the caves were built on almost every empty surface of the cave. 
Grotesque minarets and impossible domes were mixed with an architecture that separated itself so much from everything the human mind could imagine, it twisted my mind. 
The townsmen from above had gathered in front of an exact copy of the cathedral above. They chanted in a guttural tongue that made my soul shiver in time to the demonic disharmonies. Throughout the city, wandering its paved street, passing though its twisted doorways, walking past gardens filled with the fruits of fear, were the alien creatures of the carvings, tall black beings, wearing the hide and faces of a lizard, but the body of man. Scuttling about, around the feet of the lizard-men, were their servants; no words can properly describe them, especially not when the sanity of the people involved is important, but if I should try; I would say that what they most looked like the green lobster, sometimes caught in the nets of Eridodan fishermen. 
Some carried fierce-looking weapons and other carried out the errands of their masters, silently rushing between the otherworldly buildings. 
In the most shaded corners and alleys of the city, other creatures lurked, never visible, but always present. The terror these hidden abominations emitted were not of this world, but of dimensions impossible to imagine, of magic greater than even that of the cyclopean warlocks in forgotten d’Adath. These were beings to whom men were less than insects, a mere nuisance or even less than that. 
The whole scene was too much for my already weakened soul, I turned around with eyes filled with blind horror and started to run back towards the world above, the townsmen tried to grab me, their outstretched hands blocked my path to freedom and tore the clothes from my body. I do not know how, but suddenly I was free from their grip and could leave them behind me. I had dropped my torch in the struggle so I had run in darkness. 
It could have been an eternity until I found the stairs and began to ascend up into the world of the present. I ran out of the cathedral and out of the city. I lived in these mountains for months, running around in the woods, rambling incoherently and eating every living thing that came into my path. 
I slowly came back to my senses, left the mountains and went back to my old university. The cathedral in the distant mountains haunted my soul and robbed me of my sleep. Ever since the day I returned, I have scoured the libraries of the world to find something about the city below the mountains, but all I have found in over a century of searching have just been fragments from ages and worlds other than this and nothing how to stop the foul beings from breaking loose from the prison they were put in by the first men. 
I have spared you, my readers, from the most horrible details, details that I can hardly make myself remember and would make every second of your life a misery if you knew. These details are all to horrible and dangerous to put down on a simple piece of parchment, but I can tell you, my readers, that what I saw down there in the wretched nameless city under the mountains is the past, and perhaps the future, of the rolling hills, prosperous cities and deep forests of our beloved world. 
-- Magus Mefodius, Professor of Aeonic Occultism.